Saturday 10th November 2012

Are you passionate about openness (open kitten photos, open textbooks, open data, open anything!) -- but don't quite know how to explain it to your mom? Or maybe you just want to learn more about how "open" can help you. Come join a community of your peers at the School of Open!

You will learn how to teach someone something with open content, by finding, using, and sharing open content on the web on your "open" topic of interest. You will also make (and in the process learn how to design effectively) what you taught into a P2PU course.

School of Open is a community that builds and runs courses on the meaning and application of "openness" in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and beyond. It is coordinated by P2PU and Creative Commons.

The session will be split up into three parts:

1) Introductory exercises
2) Taking an open challenge
3) Building the results into a School of Open course.

We are going to discuss some of the big questions in the governance of open projects pertaining to: authority, decision making, sustainability, transparency, ownership etc.... We are interested in as many voices as possible, so if you have a story or a challenge, please come along. This is NOT a panel discussion, but a cafe chat, where everyone (who wants) joins the conversation.

Who should come?
* If you are participating in an open project, come to share
* If you are interested in using Open Governance in your project, come to learn
* If you're into free wine, come to win it

We're competing with lots of other great session, but we think we have what it takes. Here are our shameless bribes for the most committed:
* 1st 6 people to sign up - receive a bottle of wine
* Next 6 - surprise!!!
* Next 6 - sticker
* Next 6 - a kiss on the cheek

Participants will join in a facilitated and participatory discussion designed to make explicit the activation of a teaching, learning and engagement zone within Mozfest. The discussion will involve project shout-outs, brainstorming and the presentation of interest-based projects and ideas that participants would like to prototype, design and build during the festival. Participants will quickly present (three minutes or less) their projects, prototypes and half-baked ideas to the group and pick-up the gauntlet to become an activated educator—or “Hacktivator”—dedicated to using the web and its accompanying skills and literacies to change how people make, share and learn.

Superheroes of MozFest is a gripping three-minute video about a new species of humanoid—the Webmaker. This collaboratively-produced video montage provides insight into the webmaker’s habits, characteristics, and habitat by profiling a handful of individuals participating in MozFest, an annual gathering that attracts hominids interested in learning about, and playing with, the future of the World Wide Web.

Join other teens from WNYC Radio Rookies, Global Action Project and REV- to remix footage from nature docs, interview characters from within the halls at Ravensbourne and help tell a story about MozFest unlike any other previously told.

=========================================================
This session is designed to activate anyone invested in teaching others to make things! The goal will be to catalyze the educator community at MozFest and collectively develop new approaches to teaching and learning on the web. Together we'll envision prototypes, frameworks, and projects to fuel interest-based learning activities on the web. We'll explore intersections between code, content, teaching and learning. Through ideation and collaboration, we'll create paper prototypes and designs for things we want to build and/or prototype over the weekend.

We'll write a practical how to with case studies and small, concrete examples. Specific examples and stories. Success stories, challenges and failures from those in the room. From across different organizations.

Webmakers - what do you wish you had experienced and learned when you were in elementary, middle and high school? What advice would you give teachers to prepare youth to be proficient in the digital literacies of today and into the future? Come join a fireside chat with educators from the National Writing Project to explore these questions and also discuss some of the efforts being made to transform schools into places of interest-driven, youth-centered and networked learning spaces.

Tate Collective is a group of young creatives who work with a broad range of contemporary artists (multi-disciplinary) to create programme, targeted towards 15-25 year olds, for Tate Modern and Tate Britain.

This session will look at their practice of working with artists as a means of responding to the art/artists of Tate and attracting a diverse range of young people to the Tate Galleries, as one potential model for opening up the possibilities of digital production to a younger generation.

It will also explore and question the perceived barriers amongst this cohort to digital making, through open discussion and debate.

Hacktivate now! Help design and create Webmaker Projects! We'll use Thimble projects to make simple, interest-based learning experiences that help you make something cool while teaching code and other important skills along the way.

You can create awesome projects worth sharing on Webmaker.org, gain a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, experience building things, and become a contributor to a global learning effort.

Bring your ideas to this session and we'll be matching you with teams of instructors and developers who can help you shape, build and submit complete projects.

We'll learn how to prototype and build with mentors. We'll playtest our creations and demo the best of them at the closing Science Fair.

Who should come?

Instructors, designers and developers

People excited about alternative approaches to teaching and learning, excited about webmaker

We want to show the world how to use Webmaker tools like Popcorn Maker to bring radio style content to life on the web. With Popcorn Maker, you can combine the intimate experience of audio journalism with a layer of interactivity using maps, images, web pages, and annotations to learn more about the stories you are listening to.

Radio Rookies produces excellent audio programming.

Take-aways:

A better understanding of audio storytelling for the web, and inspiration to make great stories that don't require video.

Since winning a prize in the 4th Digital Media and Learning Competition, DigitalMe and schools based social learning platform Makewaves have been piloting the Mozilla Open Badges system for our S2R Medals project. We’ve been developing an exciting new way to recognise and reward the skills young people develop by taking part in our award winning Supporter to Reporter programme.

We know that through becoming a sports reporter, young people develop confidence, improved speaking and listening skills, teamwork and resilience, as well as the maturity to become mentors and pass on their skills to others. The DML open badges project is enabling us to build a series of online ‘Medals’ which recognise and reward these achievements, which young people can use to demonstrate their skills to future employers.

We’d like to share our experience of the DML pilot to date. Young people who have informed the pilot will be involved, to share their experiences and contribute to discussions. We’ll talk about the process of designing the Medals and the assessment criteria to support them, building the issuing and displaying technology and - with the input of participants - explore some of the challenges we’ve faced so far.

The session is for teachers and fans who are interested in how to get going with a Minecraft sandbox game in your very own classroom. We'll cover game fundamentals, learning how to manage a virtual world, and go over some helpful 'dos and don'ts' and pro-tips for instructors.

Take-aways:

You'll leave feeling comfortable in using the software itself, having learned how to set up and run a whole Minecraft sandbox experience, and with some ideas for you to get you going with your own classroom

Who should come?

teachers, students and Minecraft enthusiasts

Who should come?

teachers, learners, and any Minecraft savvy people to help teach others how to tame the Minecraft's interface, movement and interactions

Mozilla QA is holding a hackathon to code the first version of the
software that would power the "One and Done" initiative, also known as
the QA Taskboard.https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Task...

What is "One and Done"?
"One and Done" is a workflow where Mozilla community members can pick
Mozilla QA tasks and work on them - one at a time, one day at a time -
and feel good about completing them and thus contributing to the community.

Mozilla QA sees the "One and Done" initiative as a way for Mozilla
community contributors to get introduced to various projects and then to
become involved in an area of their interest. Contributors would be able
to find their voice in the community, be able to engage meaningfully,
and feel rewarded for their contribution.

What happens during the session?
Come write the code needed to come up with a working Version 1.0 of this
product during the session at Mozilla Festival 2012.https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Task...

We will form small groups (about 3 to 5 people). Each group will be
provided with a detailed prototype for each feature. Each group will
code the feature, test it, critique it, and iterate.

Who should come?
* Mozilla Community members who would like to give feedback on whether
this product would enable them to contribute to Mozilla QA in a concrete
way.

* Testers who would love to give feedback and test with us to
supercharge the product with awesomeness.

Take-aways:
Participants will:
* learn how to help develop Mozilla products and contribute source code
to Mozilla's code repository,
* learn how to participate at future Mozilla community gatherings to
develop the product further and
* be asked to join our mailing list to stay in touch and share progress.

We will learn how to make a free, remixable, online textbook for WebCraft. Using existing free and open educational resources, we will use a new semantic web editor to convert and combine materials into a single coherent book.

We will use materials from Mozilla, P2PU, Saylor.org, Connexions, Open University's Lab Spaces, and other web sources as a guide. After a brief introduction of the project and resources, we will divide into small groups, each tackling a different set of topics. The groups will decide on materials needed, find resources, check reuse permissions, and use the remixing tool to convert and edit the resources. CC-BY materials can be published at Connexions, cnx.org. If time permits, groups will share links to their creations with P2PU course organizers.

Take-aways:

A Webcraft Textbook Draft that will be adaptable for use in peer learning, MOOCs, self-learning, and more. Participants will be able to continue extending, editing, and adapting the work afterwards.

We're exploring how to foster this community of knowledge makers using online tools. We see these communities functioning to grow an emerging field of practice in education (ie. digital literacy and connected learning), and in this session, we'll gather experiences from fellow educators and knowledge makers, as well as community managers, developers, and designers, to further shape the existing organizing tools and overall forum.

We are going into a full updating and redesign process in 2013. Come to this design challenge and help us imagine Digital Is into the future!

==================================================================
Pulling inspiration from ideas and designs that come out of the design session, the Prototyping Jam will bring designers, educators and developers together to hack on prototypes and develop learning pathways. People with ideas and designs will bring together their design, copy, metadata and code into fully functional prototypes that help learners gain valuable web literacy skills and help educators teach them.

What does it mean to 'level up' with web skills? Join us as we talk about version 0.9 of Mozilla's web literacies white paper. Have some input as we develop our thinking further and use it to power Webmaker badges.

We'll give you an overview of our latest work and then ask for your input. It'll be an interactive session for everyone from those coming across the area of new literacies for the first time through to those wanting to give a detailed critique. You can take a look for yourself to prepare for the session at http://mzl.la/weblit.

Who should come?

Educators interested in using Mozilla's web literacies work in the classroom

Developers looking to give us some feeedback

Anyone curious about levelling up their web skills, competencies and literacies

The next generation of Scratch, Scratch 2.0 (https://vimeo.com/41683547) is going to be hosted online, as a Cloud based application. With this shift, we are adding a number of features to Scratch that allows it to "plug in" to the web, enabling young programmers using Scratch to collect and store data online, explore coding with online maps, etc. In this session, we are going to focus specifically on these web-connection features of Scratch 2.0, exploring how young programmers can use these features to create interactive mini web-apps in a wide range of genres (eg: interactive stories, games, surveys, etc.). The specific features we are going to focus on are:

Cloud Data Structures: Cloud Data Structures are extensions of variables and lists in Scratch 2.0, where data in Cloud Data Structures are stored online. With Cloud Data Structures, young programmers using Scratch can create projects that collect and store data online, such as surveys, games with high-score lists, etc.

Maps: Scratch 2.0 has experimental support for Google Maps, allowing young programmers to create interactive Scratch projects which can query and display Google maps. Example projects with maps in Scratch 2.0 include virtual tours of neighborhoods, map based visualizations such as heatmaps, etc.

Build a tactile learning activity with CodeCards. We'll start with a demo of CodeCards to show what it is and how it can be used, before brainstorming ideas for tactile learning tools, relating to both the web and computing as well as more traditional (read: boring) subjects. Then we'll have a quick crash-course in developing with CodeCards, before we start building stuff.

Kuda provides an easy to use interface to build powerful interactive 3D (WebGL) content. This open source framework was designed to empower a new generation to develop the 3D web.

By learning how to use Kuda participants will be able to create more engaging websites in the future and be on the forefront of the 3D web. Advancing this toolset will help us all to enjoy a more enriched web.

Kuda abstracts the complexity of 3D behaviors into basic building blocks for common functions that simplify the process of creating complex sequences of events which respond to user input.

Take-aways:

The Learning Lab will provide an introduction to the tools and basic training in their use. No sit ups required!

Users will be provided with a number of pre-built properly licensed (Creative Commons) models that we can start using.

This session will allow users to see the potential of WebGL and this toolset to see the potential of a 3D web and focus on using the tool set to build interactive content such as games and simulations.

Who should come?

we'd like to invite developers to our learning lab, but welcome people of all backgrounds, skills and abilities for the design challenge.

In early December, the International Telecommunication Union will meet in Dubai to consider treaty commitments that will turn over significant aspects of Internet regulation to nations, stripping away functions that have always been managed through open, community-based approaches. Members of civic society and the general public are largely barred from these meetings: at the ITU, nations alone will decide the fate of the web.

We're taking action. We've brought together a super-group of advocates, policy experts and campaigners to scheme about how to raise awareness internationally about the lack of public participation and transparency in these meetings, and to defend the self-governance of the Internet. It's looking like a great group - confirmed organizations so far include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Access Now and Free Press (with more on the way).

In addition to this, Mozilla itself will be throwing its hat into the ring with an experimental micro-granting program that will accelerate these advocacy efforts, and work to broaden the grassroots community around these types of issues. We'll be discussing this, as well as planning the final few weeks as we march towards the meeting in December. Every willing hand helps, and we'd love to have you.

Take-aways:

First, you'll get a crash course in the often hidden world of international politics around the Internet: what is the ITU? And, why is this upcoming meeting important?

Second, you'll learn about what advocacy organizations around the world are doing to raise awareness about these issues.

Finally, you'll hear about how you can get involved, and we'll talk about ideas that might drive awareness going into November.

This summer, we had more than 685 events in 80+ countries through the Summer Code Party. So, how can we have more next time? And how can we make the hosts that sign up feel more supported and better prepared, and help the events that happen be even higher quality?

Come and help us produce tangible materials to help answer the questions above.

What will we do?

Produce some video tutorials to show potential hosts just how easy it is

Improve our event toolkits to have more and better onboarding for novice hosts and ways to gather feedback and storytelling elements afterward

Work with the projects on webmaker.org/projects to create some playlists that hosts could easily draw upon based on their guests experience levels and interests

*What we made
Tascasaurus: https://thimble.webmaker.org/p/fcc6
SEO Battle: Search Engine Optimization Activity (using Thimble): https://thimble.webmaker.org/p/fl2f
Dinosaur Popcorn Remix - Quick Hacktivity https://thimble.webmaker.org/p/fddq
Friends and great discussion on modular learning materials :)
===========================================================
Participants in this session will have the opportunity to create new learning activities or hack pre-existing ones. We'll use pre-existing modular activities or "hacktivities" as a jumping off point to brainstorm, design and develop activities that are based on participants' interests. We'll use Mozilla's tools to help introduce, instruct or apply web skills. Participants can bring their own ideas or start with pre-existing activity kits, projects and/or content created in other sessions at the Mozilla Festival.

In this session, we invite participants to discuss and design ways to expand the participation of hackerspaces to children and their families.

Hackerspaces and makerspaces have enabled people with common interests to create, connect, and collaborate on projects in shared, community-operated spaces. However, these hackerspaces are often the domains of adults and already enthusiastic inventors of all trades, such as artists, designers, engineers, and hobbyists. How can we design a community space, like playgrounds, to be accessible to children, their families, and community members who are less familiar with the tools, activities, and, at times, implicit social norms that come with these spaces?

Join The MacArthur Foundation's Connie Yowell and NESTA's Tom Kenyon to discuss how these innovative grant makers have funded and developed 21st century learning agendas that are leading the way on how we think about teaching and learning in a digital age. Connie and Tom will discuss MacArthur's Connected Learning principles and NESTA's Digital Making initiative and talk with the community about how these ideas both work together and how they can drive a Digital Literacy movement.